Angel On My Shoulder
by David N. Brown
Summary: Meet Schuyler Grey, a schizophrenic volunteer who accompanies Johanna Mason to the Hunger Games.
1. First Blood

**The backstory to this story: On request, I submitted a profile for an original character to "CesteIzAFanLotz" for "300th Hunger Games SYOT". I decided I liked my creation enough to give him his own story, which the user who solicited the profile has agreed with. I chose Johanna Mason's Hunger Games as the timeframe for "my" take on the character because I envisioned him as coming from 7 and I have fun writing for Johanna.**

They are only a few years apart in age, him not quite 21 and her 24, but behind the eyes is the difference of May and December. He has the look of impetuous, vaguely angry youth, despite the mark of a burn on one cheek. Hers is the look of ageless weariness that can just manage to hide behind a cynical smile. Tonight, however, she isn't hiding.

"I'm Gale Hawthorne," he says, "and welcome to part 3 of our Hunger Games retrospective. My guest tonight is Johanna Mason, the `Victor' of the 69th Games, and my producer and good friend. This interview is her request, and frankly, she hasn't told me just what she wants to talk about. So, Johanna, what is it you want our audience to hear?"

"I want to talk... about one of the Tributes from the Game," she says, holding her voice steady. "I guess I'll start where the Games started..."

From the start, the 69th Games was business as usual, but a little faster. Half a dozen Tributes died in the bloodbath. I ran for it straight away, but I saw the first kill. It was the District 2 tribute, can't recall his name offhand, we just called him Wolf. Volunteer, as always, and bigger, tougher and flat-out nastier than most. Bad enough the other Careers decided he was the first order of business. I actually saw the important thing, which was that it was the girl who came with him, Ion, who did the real work. He was so huge, it took a bit of time for him to get a full head of steam, and so she was able to come in from behind and get him in the shins halfway. Then the rest of the career boys grabbed for weapons, and it was obvious they had planned it all along.

One of them was the boy from Three, and I could tell it was his idea. I always thought of him by a name from one of the legends of the Ancients: Napoleon. He had good skills, and he was smart, but he was too small to hold his own in a stand-up fight. He was fast, though, and by the time Wolf was down he already had the only bow. He gave it to Wolf just south and west of the heart, in the liver where it's sure but slow, and I never doubted it was on purpose. Then the regular Career boys, Rook from One and Erne from Four, came in with a polearm and a harpoon. Erne threw, and Rook slashed with this nasty hook. They may have planned it cold, but those two were still giving it to Wolf when the cannon sounded, and I heard "boom-boom" right after that. By then, I was away from the circle, going as fast as I could, with nothing but a toothpick knife that someone threw in my direction.

They had us in a forest, which people think was what gave me the advantage, because my District does forestry. Actually, it was knowing about forests that nearly did me in, because I knew the second I was out of the ground that this forest was like nothing this world's seen in a thousand years. The "forests" in Seven are really more like farms: We cut the trees down and move on, the trees grow back, and in a century or a few decades or even ten years, we make our way back and cut them down again. But these trees would have been hundreds and thousands of years old if they had occurred naturally. They were hundreds of feet tall, yards thick, and there could be dozens of yards between them with nothing but dead leaves. And then there was me in the middle, knowing all of this, and wondering how the Gamemmakers _did_ it.

I kept making my way along through the first day, trying to get as far as I can from the starting point. I heard the final count of the bloodbath, one more after, and two more as the afternoon went on. The last cannon got me wondering if we were going to have a full dozen by nightfall, which would make it the bloodiest first day since the Second Quell, and maybe an all-time record. Stupid. I barely noticed in time that someone was on my tail.

It was two guys, but not from the Careers. I knew one of them, a guy from 12 name of Kohl- honest, look it up- and I guessed the other guy was from 11, because he had dark skin. They had spears they had cut from old branches, both bloody. I knew they had gotten out fast, too, and I figured there couldn't be anyone too close behind them, or they wouldn't be bothering to come after me. I probably could have gotten away, but as long as it was just two of them, I wanted to try out the skills I had been hiding during training.

I already had a plan, and it was one I had seen played before: Get right behind the one in the rear and take him out, and throw for the one in front. But they made it a bit tough. They were going back and forth, one going ahead and then the other catching up, and the one in front always looking over his shoulder. They could have stopped me cold, except they kept watching each other. That was all I needed to double back as they were rounding a big tree and get the dark boy once in each kidney. I had done that, once before. But I didn't do it quite right, because the dark boy got off a squeal, and on top of that, the cannon went off.

By the time the dark boy hit the ground, I had pulled out a hatchet from the black boy's belt and had the knife ready to throw. Like anybody who knows anything about knife throwing, I expected to miss, which shouldn't have mattered because just the distraction of a knife throw would be time enough to do something with the hatchet. But the scream gave Kohl time to turn around, so his eyes locked on me straightaway, and by the time the knife went by his ear, he was coming straight for me. I didn't have time to do anything but run.

I ran for quite a ways, until I couldn't hear Kohl behind me anymore, and then I started to worry. I knew he was pretty smart and knew his way around a forest well enough. If he wasn't behind me anymore, I had to assume he could be ahead. Sure enough, when I listened, I heard him, coming from ahead. Only, he didn't seem to be coming straight at me, and I started to wonder if he was after someone else. That was when I heard Kohl's shout, not words or anything but just surprise, and a crash that made me think of a deadfall. That should have gotten me running the other way, but in that moment, I just wanted to see the look on Kohl's face. So I ran for the sound, and I saw Kohl hanging upside down ten feet in the air, and still I didn't think twice about running toward him- not until I felt something jerk my ankle, and the next minute found myself ten feet up there with Kohl. Then I looked down, as someone stepped out from behind a tree, and said, "Sky?"


	2. Gray Sky

**I'm planning on taking my time posting updates for this story (I already tried keeping pace with this fandom, and it just doesn't work), but I felt like going ahead and at least posting the chapter I wrote to introduce Sky.**

As Johanna Mason speaks, now and then an image or a mercifully brief clip brief clip flashes on the screens. Now, an image comes to bear, of a tall, gangling young man in clothes made from a patchwork of rags mounting the stage next to a young Johanna. "Schuyler Grey, also known as Gray Sky," says Gale Hawthorne. "The last volunteer from District 7, and one of eight in its history. Can you tell us about him?" Then Johanna continues...

Before I tell you about Schuyler Grey, I should tell you something about the men in Seven. Even now, the picture people get is of a poster-perfect lumberjack standing proud like a knight in a plaid shirt. What the reality comes down to is, when a man cuts down trees for a living, the odds are he won't live very long. In the meantime, there's only so many things he's going to want to do when he gets home, and he's not going to ask for it nicely. Another thing about the men is, they love to fight, and when they get going, they don't pay attention to anything else. Bad idea when you've got axes and machinery and falling trees around. Just for example, I once asked my ha'aunt- that's my mother's half-sister, and she raised me- who my grandfather was. She said my grandmother claimed to have had it down to one of two brothers. Unfortunately, those two brothers got to arguing about it themselves, and both fell into a wood chipper. Don't know if it's true, but it would've been typical. All the men in my family that I ever knew went in ways that weren't any smarter, and they took quite a few women with them.

Then there was Sky.

He would always wander in the woods. As far as anyone knew, he never cut down any tree, but he knew the forest better than any jack. He would be out there for days, weeks, even months at a time, and people didn't make a secret of hoping that he wouldn't come back. People saw him most often at the outskirts of the 'jack camps, where I lived. The only times we saw him in the day were when it was overcast, which was how he got the nickname. Otherwise, he would only come out at sunset, and people were sure- and probably right- that he would roam around at night. People were scared of him because of that, but those of us who saw him thought a little better of him.

What really won us over was that he had a way with animals. It was like he didn't just know them, it was like they loved him. I remember seeing him stretch out his arm, and a mockingjay landed right on his hand and sang to him. Another time, I saw him pick a possum off a tree branch and pet it just like a puppy. If that doesn't sound impressive, just remember possums have been around for, like, a hundred million years, and they didn't last all that time by playing dead! I suppose we let ourselves get a little too rosy-eyed about that. I mean, he had to be eating something when he was out in the woods. Still, no question, he had a gift. Then there was another thing... he talked to angels. Or anyway, one.

If you were close enough to hear him at all, he would be talking. You might think he was talking to himself, or to the trees and animals and whatnot, but if you looked, you could see he kept his head turned to the right, and if you listened, you could tell he was talking- and would stop talking- as if someone was talking back. He didn't just talk, he would discuss, and argue, and even swear. If you talked to him, like I did once in a while, and asked him, like I did just once, why he was talking, he would say, "I have an angel on my shoulder."

Every year at the Reaping, the Peacekeepers would round children up beforehand. Our district was big enough that they had to do a few elimination rounds before the final Reaping, so only some of us were rounded up, but I had taken out enough tesserae that I made it every year. There were a few other familiar faces. Two of them were always together, Jennifer Green and Janos Odell- Jen and Jan. Jan was a jack's jack, and a good enough man to live up to the ideal. Jen was one of the nice girls, in training to be a mechanic. They were a steady couple, which was a rare enough thing. They had taken out tesserae to support each other, which meant they couldn't get married until after their sixth Reaping. They were really waiting, and that was talk of the District. The other was Schuyler Grey. He would always come, and it wasn't because he was rounded up. We didn't even know for sure if his name was in the lottery. He just walked in from the woods, and nobody ever tried keeping him away.

So, that year, the ratface from Capitol drew the girls' name first, and it was mine. I just went up quiet, and nobody acted like they were going to miss me. I didn't really care, because even the Games didn't look any worse than what I had coming. In the old films, they would show women with the jacks, doing the work that took more than muscle: Surveying, driving trucks, maintaining equipment, doing the paperwork back at camp. It happened, no question, but that was only about 10% of the jobs, and you had to be well-educated even to get a shot. For the rest of us, there were only two ways to make real money: Give the men what they wanted, or don't and take the money anyway. I had tried doing the latter, with four of my ha'cousins, until it was down to two of us, and I didn't want to think about the alternative.

Then Ratface drew the boy's name, and it was Jan Odell. Jenny screamed and wrapped her arms around him, and another woman ran to them, a nice lady who had a good job repairing trucks, about forty-nine, which was practically ancient in the camps. She was Jenny's full-blood aunt, but everyone thought of her as her mother, and by any standard that mattered, she was. Her name was Rowena Grey, and Sky was her only child by blood.

Row took hold of Jan and Jen, and she started shrieking. A couple Peacekeepers started to move in, and Jan himself was trying to calm them down and go quietly, but Row wouldn't let him go. Even Jen pulled away, but Row actually jumped on his back and wrapped herself around him. It was bizarre, this bitty colleen hanging on a huge jack like a tabby attacking a panther, and he couldn't get her off. Then Jen ran up, and it looked like together, she and Jan might calm her down. But the peacekeepers were already coming, and I was thinking what we were all thinking: _They are going to kill her._

Then Sky walked up, and he said the longest string of complete, grammatically correct sentences anyone had ever heard him say to another human being: "I volunteer. I will take his place. Do not worry. I have an angel on my shoulder." He walked right up on stage. Ratface looked ready to protest, which he could have done. The Capitol had procedures to screen people who were flat-out full-mental from the drawings, and they always made a show of how the volunteers were only those of sound mind who came of their own free will. But then Ratface just shrugged, and announced our names for the camera to make it official.

Then they hustled us off, because things were behind schedule, and when I looked back, I saw something that stuck in my mind. Everyone in the crowd was looking either at Row or at Sky. It was like they were just remembering that Sky was a human being, and thinking for the first time that maybe he deserved something decent. Like his own mother fighting or screaming or at least shedding some tears for him the way she just had for her niece's intended. But all she did was put her arms around Jan and Jen. None of them even looked at the platform.


	3. The Angel's Verdict

**I have been posting this story with a "lead" in completed material. This chapter completes the "setup" for the planned remainder of the story, and I decided to go ahead and post it. I also went back and cleaned up the first two chapters a bit, after doing some review of a printed copy. No matter what I do, there's always things that seem to slip by until I have it printed on paper.**

The screen shows a clip, never aired, of the two Tributes of District 7: Schuyler Grey, the young man who said he had an angel on his shoulder, and Johanna Mason at his mercy, along with the boy from 12. Her voice continues:

So there I was, ten feet up and upside down, looking down at this guy who looks like a human coatrack, holding this big, weird knife that curves forward. He always carried one like it in the woods at home, and I found out later it was called a kukri. I suppose he was able to snag it in the bloodbath because nobody else wanted it, and probably took the massive coil of rope over his left shoulder off a corpse. He certainly didn't kill for them, because training made it painfully clear he didn't have the skill or the instincts to fight his way out of a wet paper bag. The Judges gave him a 4, and I'm sure even that was just for his wilderness skills. What nobody could see, except me, was that those skills were better for real survival than the best fighting in the world.

He started to twist the end of the rope between his fingers, like he did with a ball of twine he always had at home, and it meant he was thinking. He looked up at me, and then turned his head a little to the right and started to talk, and when he didn't talk, he would nod or shake his head and make faces like he was listening: "Can't hurt. No. No women... Yes. Don't have to do anything. Didn't make her walk in, no wrong to leave her there... Think about it. Him first."

He took one look at Kohl, and said, "Yes." Then he walked around the tree, and I heard just one swipe. Kohl dropped straight down, headfirst, right onto a big rock. Again, the cannon went off immediately, and it was official: Half the Tributes were dead before the first sunset. Then he walked back to where I was hanging, and pulled away a rock underneath me.

He untied my rope and let me down just slow enough to leave me stunned. He ran in, pulled the loop from around my ankle, and drew back. "Nice trick," I said to him. "Just try and see how it works on a Career pack. So what do you want? No, I can guess: You'd like an alliance."

"No," he said. "Angel says you say no."

"Then I guess your angel might be good for something," I said. "But we can still help each other, for a little while, right? Maybe through tomorrow." He gathered his rope, and after inclining his head to the right, he took a look in Kohl's pack. I could see night glasses, two good knives, and a full canteen. What he took was two ration packages, one of jerky and one of fruit, and then he started walking. I took the rest, quickly because I could hear the hovercraft coming to collect him, and after a moment's thought, I followed him.

As we were walking, he took a look at one of the few bits of vegetation besides the trees, a leafy stalk that looks like a katniss plant. "Poison," he said. "Angel says so."

I decided to try talking to him. "So, what happened in the bloodbath?" I asked. "I saw Wolf get it; who else took the early out?"

He almost whirled around. "You still here?" he said. He didn't even sound angry, just surprised.

"Yes, I'm still here," I said. He shook his head and looked away. "So. Who did you see die?" I knew asking was a long shot, because Sky remembered people the way a fish net holds water. Usually, he didn't even look at faces. But when I mentioned it, he sheathed his knife and took out his ball of twine, and started weaving a cat's cradle between his fingers as he walked.

"Coal miner and brown boy kill girls with them," he said. "Not even fight. Bad boys. Wrong to hurt girls." I nod. I had seen enough in training to know the weakness for which he was well and truly over the chipper: Even allowing for fighting abilities that were nearly negative to begin with, the simple fact was that he refused to do anything to harm a woman.

Just watching him do things with the string reminded me of something I was really trying to forget: Sky's capacity to make a plan made his fighting skills look stellar. Four times, I saw him try to form an intricate pattern, and not once does he finish it. Clumsiness was not the problem. He wove the twine so skillfully, it was beautiful to watch, and I could see ahead to the beautiful patterns he was forming. Trouble was, I could anticipate better than he could. Always, somewhere along the line, he would lose it. The first time, he ran out of string. Then he did something wrong and the string ended up tangled in a big knot. The next time, he did it again and got his fingers stuck. Then he started something new, and it seemed to go well, until he stopped, looked at it, and got this confused look like he forgot what he was doing.

All of this would make one wonder how he did those snares, not to mention how he ever stayed alive in the woods. I make the reasonable guess that the snares didn't give him the same problems because they're meant to do something, and if he lost his place he could go back to what it's supposed to do. Maybe he was working off plans he memorized somewhere along the line. As for the bigger question, I already had an answer. He thrived in the woods for the same reason that little kids who get lost there come back alive more often than adults: He never let a plan get in the way of staying alive.

After a pause, he continued, "Cowboy, engineer, weaver fight archer. We see. Archer makes girls fight. Two girls die, kill weaver, archer shoots engineer, girl with archer runs. Bad boys find her later. Cowboy, girls take food, run, leave engineer for fisherman."

It didn't take me long to put this together. Obviously, the weaker districts formed an alliance against the Careers. The archer could only be Napoleon, and the engineer, weaver and cowboy would be the male Tributes from Six, Eight and Ten respectively. Napoleon used the girls in the Career as fodder to take the brunt of the attack, and two of them died taking down Eight. The female Tribute from Three decided to make a go of it on her own, and eventually ran into the fairweather friends from Eleven and Twelve. Eight was wounded with an arrow and undoubtedly run down for the seventh cannon shot, while Ten and a few girls got away with a sizable store of food. I knew right off the bat, that was a problem.

The boy from Ten was named Richard, and he always made me think of another legend from the Ancients, actually a play- _Richard the Third_. He was a good fighter, with the makings of a schemer, though I was sure he was no match for Napoleon. All through training, he was talking to people from the weaker Districts about forming an alliance against the Careers. He focused on Eight, Nine and Three, but he talked to everybody, and I could tell he took more than a passing interest in Sky and me. He made no secret that he saw the value of Sky's knowledge of the wilderness, and he did plenty to hint that he suspected I was hiding how well I could fight. That gave me every reason to believe that, one way or another, he would be looking for me.


	4. Chosen Victim

Johanna's voice begins to quaver slightly. She keeps her eyes lowered to a set of prepared notes, and noticeably away from Gale:

Even before the sun set, it was as dark as night under the forest canopy. I put the glasses on, but Schuyler didn't need them. He not only kept walking, I was sure he was getting better. I started to wonder if it might be worth letting this partnership last a little longer. At any rate, he was the one person I could be sure wouldn't use an alliance as an opportunity to stab me in the back.

He put away the twine, which I was pretty sure meant he was getting more comfortable. Then he stopped, stooped and came up with a tiny rodent in his hand. He held it up between fingers and thumb as it squeaked. Soon it quieted, and he let it sit in his open hand and then scurry up his right arm. I noticed when it reached his shoulder, it went across his back and down his left arm, avoiding the spot where he said an angel perched.

"Sky," I said, "where are you going?"

"Wherever the angel leads me," he answered. It was what I expected, and it got me thinking again. It was one thing that Sky couldn't come up with a long-term survival plan if his life did depend on it. I already decided that didn't have to be a deal breaker. In the woods, it's the people who plan as big as Napoleon and Richard who walk straight off a cliff or restock their packs by picking deathcaps. But making decisions based on consultations with an angel on his shoulder was a whole other pile of random. I got two ideas: One was to drop the idea of a partnership and walk away. The other was to ask if I could take over the executive role.

Then something else came back up in my mind: The forest wasn't a natural forest, and ultimately, the Games were not a real survival situation. The Games were never about doing what it really takes to stay alive in a hostile environment; they were about us killing each other off. Anyone who played by its rules in the woods would win nothing but a very lonely death. That was the insanity of the Games, but the thought crossed my mind, as it had now and then, that the insanity could serve a very sane purpose. As long as people's reference point for survival situations was the Games, they would forget the things that really worked. Like banding together against adversity instead of feuding pointlessly, and how might that apply to Panem society at large?

That was when I knew: Sky was a true survivor, and that was why there was nothing the Gamemasters would not do to make sure he was not the Victor. They were going to kill him. They were going to do it soon, and they were going to do it bad. I turned and ran, just before I heard the slithering.

I looked over my shoulder, and I didn't see Sky. What I did see was the ground alive with snakes. Sky must have sensed something, or maybe gotten a word from the "angel" on his shoulder, and gotten up a tree. I was glad for that, and I hoped the Gamemasters were sore about it. They were going to have to learn to try harder to take Sky in the dark. Not that it did me any good.

I sprinted as fast as I could, and it wasn't any trouble to outpace the snakes. But the snakes weren't stopping, either. There had to be at least ten thousand of them, probably enough to form dangerous concentrations all over the arena. But they stayed together in the solid, seething swarm, moving with what could only be the Gamemasters' purpose. It looked like they had decided I was worth killing, too.

Before I could outdistance the snakes, I went up and over a ridge and down into a valley, which gave the snakes extra speed on the downhill slope. Just when they were literally at my heels, I splashed right across a stream and started uphill. As I hoped, the snakes stopped at the bottom, and started fanning out the way any predatory creature would. I guessed that I had hit the edge of a sector in the Arena.

I laughed, and I was happy. I started to survey what was around me. The valley and the ridges that bounded it went on a long ways, zigzagging down from a mountainous highland toward the center of the Arena. There were only a few of the big trees here, and not very big by their standards, which allowed enough lesser vegetation for good cover. A score of some kind of pig-sized armored reptiles were coming down in the near distance, but they were grazing on plants. I remembered getting a glimpse of some kind of rift near the Circle, and I wonder if that was the end of this valley.

I went uphill a little ways, to a prominence of the ridge. Sure enough, when I looked down I could see the Cornucopia. The Careers had piled up the food and gear, and Napoleon was standing on top, with his bow and arrow at ready. The way he looked around convinced me that he had nightglasses himself, and I decided to get down. I was on the way down when I found the the boot. Badly chewed and bloody. With, I determined on inspection, the foot inside.

Hovercraft always collected bodies, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear. We had kept them busy that day, so it made sense that quality would slip a bit. Still, it had to have taken something nastier than usual to leave someone in enough pieces for one to be missed. There was no way it was other tributes. It was a big foot, definitely a guy's, and it looked to me like a match for the Niner. As for how it got detached from its owner, I got a good look at a remnant of the shin bone. The end was both sheared and fractured, and it looked like it had been all at once. The only time I saw anything like it before was when I cleaned up a jack who got his arm severed by a maul. Needless to say, I wasn't feeling happy anymore.

Just then I heard something big coming. It was one of the reptiles, and I easily convinced myself that there was no way one of these ate Niner. If anything, this was the culprit's prey. It looked like a cross between an alligator and a turtle, with a round, armored body covered in spikes and plates and a boxy, horned head. I moved in a little closer, and it squawked and gave a warning swish with a spiky club on the end of its stumpy tail. I backed off, and it started digging in the underbrush with clawed feet and tusk-like projections of its beak jaws. I could see that these creatures were far from harmless, at least capable of defending themselves and maybe of making real trouble if they were territorial or in some kind of panic. But there was no way that fat body could muster the speed to rundown a healthy man, nor could I picture those jaws doing the damage I had seen to Niner's leg. It might gnaw through somebody's leg if it put its mind to it, but it could not go through bone at one stroke.

It wasn't much longer before the faces of the Tributes play in the sky, mostly confirming what I already knew. I did find out that the girls from One and Four are dead, which would make Ion the last woman in the Career pack. I found out that the girl from Five was dead, and guessed, as I later confirmed, that she had tangled with Kohl and the dark boy. That gave me a clear enough picture of the state of who was left. Eight were divided between packs of equal size but unequal strength: One had three men armed with good weapons, the other had only one man, and unless the Careers really slipped, there was only one way that could end. The only other players left were an unaligned boy and girl, me and Sky.

I was jarred by a grunting squeal, and looked to see the reptile scuttle away and kick dirt on something behind it. I took a closer look, and saw a root vegetable partially exposed by the creature's digging. It looked like a katniss root, but I had never seen one quite like it before, except once- when Sky pointed to the cluster of leaves and announced that the angel on his shoulder warned him it was poison.


	5. Cold War

Johanna's voice is calmer as she continues, now looking directly at her interviewer, Gale Hawthorne:

I slept in a big tree the first night. On something of a whim, I stowed the Niner's foot in a hollowed-out hole. I had a notion that it might come in handy as a visual aid if I needed to sell someone on not killing me.

The second day was completely quiet. I found out later that ratings took the second worst dive in Games history, second only to the "Tundra Games" fiasco. After opening day, everyone was starting to see the merits of lying low. Even the Careers settled for guarding their pile. Cesar Flickerman had to spin like crazy about "the calm before the storm". I spent the day going up the valley, looking for the edge of the Arena like someone always does.

I caught a snake for my lunch and set out. Walking the better part of the day, I went uphill. Things got windy, and just a little chilly. Once, I saw a disturbance in the brush on the other side of the valley, whole treeing swaying from something really big. I got one glimpse of something big and black, not enough to get an idea of what it looked like but enough to be sure it was longer than I was tall. By mid-afternoon, I reached the end, just about due north of 12 o'clock in the Circle.

It was a pass between two crags, with only a blind drop beyond. I could see a whole plain stretched out before me, with tilled fields and a village. It was beautiful, enough to get me thinking something really crazy. As an antidote, I moved to one side, keeping my eye on the village. It started to stretch, like I was looking at the edge of a soap bubble, and I knew it was too good to be true. Not only was there a force field in the way, I was quite sure that what I saw was just a projection on the inside of it. Any hope of escape, or even of other people living in a better, happier place, was an illusion. I couldn't imagine that this wasn't the Gamemasters' idea of driving home a point.

I heard him before I saw him, muttering, "No, no... not yet." I looked across the pass to see Sky on the other side, nodding. He looked the same as before, though his clothes were already getting ragged. His rope was noticeably shorter, and he was holding a snake. The reptile was winding itself happily up and down his arm, and it was beautiful in a messed-up sort of way, except I couldn't help wondering what had happened to the mouse. He seemed either completely unaware of me, or completely uninterested. He turned and walked away. I wanted to cry out, but I knew the time for that was past.

I made my way back to the tree where I had slept. I already had a plan for the next day. When the Tributes came up in the Circle, they were always ordered counterclockwise, and while anything could happen in the confusion of the melee, they usually ended up somewhere in an arc corresponding to their starting point. Thus, as long as Napoleon and the careers were staying put at the Cornucopia, I could travel westward without worrying about running into the other tributes, unless it was the Fiver, but I suspected he would be making his way over toward Richard to offer to reconsider the alliance.

As night fell, I saw a fire from the direction of 10 on the reversed clock. Usually, that meant nothing more or less than desperation or stupidity, but I knew Richard wasn't stupid and I doubted very much that he was desperate. I guessed that the fire was bait to draw Napoleon and the Careers into a trap, and I was sure Napoleon was drawing the same conclusion. That didn't necessarily mean Richard had acted in vain. A trap that Napoleon could see through was, in its way, as useful as one that worked, because it sent a clear message: Richard was, in his own estimation, ready to fight, and even if his tactics were ambush, that almost certainly meant he had something new, like an extra ally.

Things got more interesting the third day. It started with me in what became the most replayed moment of the Game... you can go ahead and play it, Gale, I don't even care anymore. I spent the night the night on a tree branch with my back against the trunk. I woke up sudden, like something had just registered in my mind. I looked down, and found this snake between my legs, with its nose right against my crotch. I guess it decided it was warm there! I didn't even think, I just did the first thing that came to mind: I swung around on my backside, keeping a hand on the trunk, and opened my legs. The snake dropped before it could react, probably because it was still warming up, and I just managed to keep from falling out of the tree... Okay, you can stop laughing, Gale.

I was shivering, and not from the snake. The temperature had dropped in the night and stayed down, and there was a thin mist all over the forest. It was the cold snap that had the snakes looking for warm places to hide. Even the big reptiles were hunkering down in caves and crevasses, usually as many as would fit to pool their body heat. Watching them made me think again about the true meaning of survival. Those big lunkheads could understand that Rule Number One was to stick together. Why couldn't we?

Fortunately, I got a parachute with a windbreaker. Within half an hour, another chute came in with my breakfast- a pair of biscuit and sausage sandwiches that had to be from Capitol. I stopped to eat them while I checked out a commotion from the Circle. Rook, from One, was down with a snake bite. Erne, the Four Tribute, was definitely for finishing the job, but Napoleon wanted to keep him around, and he was arguing his point with the bow. Before they could try settling the argument, a parachute came down out of the sky. It had four syringes, and Ion administered one to Rook and another to everyone else in the group. It was antivenom, of course, the most expensive gift in the history of the Games, and only One could have paid for it.

That gave me a sense of what Napoleon was about. Without his bow, he was no match for Erne or Rook, and if they turned on him together, they would have had a decent chance of taking him out before he got off a shot. But Erne and Rook were equally matched against each other, so if he was gone, one of them was sure to go next. So, Napoleon was making sure they all stayed together, to preserve his balance of power, and he was going to think long and hard about letting anyone else in. That was enough for me to stow the beginning of a plan in my mind and go west.

By noon, I was halfway around the Arena, at the shore of a lake at 6 o'clock. I stopped when a cannon sounded, and I took cover when I heard a hovercraft overhead. I looked up and saw it flying along with a body still dangling. I recognized the girl from Six by her red hair. She still had one of the false-katniss roots in her hand. I knew immediately, this was bad. Whatever Richard had managed to take, it was running low enough for him to do something ugly. I could see two ways it could have gone down. One was that they had tried restocking their food with available plants, and the Sixer had been required to act as taste tester. The other was that she had been forced out, one way or another, to conserve their food. Either way, knowing teenage girls, there was a good chance it wasn't just Richard's idea.

That settled things for me. I started back. It would take the rest of the day to go back and get what I needed, and it would be best to wait for morning anyway. Then I would do the only remotely sane thing there was to do: I was going to ask to join the Career pack.


	6. Fiver

Johanna leans back in her seat, facing away from Gale, but her host moves closer, and discretely extends his hand to her under the table. She returns his supportive gesture with a squeeze, and continues:

The third night, I had a dream of the Reaping. Everything was the same, except that now I saw Sky's angel. He was not a little cherub perched on Sky's shoulder. He didn't even have wings, that I could see. He was a giant, floating in the air with his head held next to Sky's ear. Some kind of mantle wrapped around the angel's body, and a hood covered the face. As Sky's mother screamed and clung to Jan Odell, the angel spoke, and I could hear even from the stage. It was the most beautiful voice I had ever heard. I couldn't understand, I wasn't sure if it was even speaking real words, but I could just begin to feel a stirring in my mind, and something about it made me certain that the voice could not be for good. I wanted to scream at the angel to leave him alone, and let things fall as they might. But then the angel raised its head, just a little, and I saw pure light coming out from under the hood, and I was too terrified to speak, because the angel might throw back the hood and show me his face.

I woke up suddenly, just before dawn, to the buzz of flies and the smell of putrefying flesh. The Niner's foot was not keeping well. A wind was blowing through the valley, making things colder. Below, I could see swirling eddies of mist, making it thicker for the moment, but it looked to me like it was blowing away. That meant the wind was dry as well as cold. The lunkheads were out again, but pressing together in tight-packed masses the same way they had when they hunkered down. Then I heard them squawk, and instinctively, I shouted down, "Who's there?"

"Just me," came the answering voice. I recognized it after a moment.

"Fiver?" I called down. "What are you doing here?"

"My name's Hermes," he said. "I saw you yesterday, and followed you back. You were good, but I'm not bad, and I got a couple good breaks. One of them was the smell. Whatever you got up there with you, girl, it is way past the use-by date."

"I wasn't expecting anyone to be around," I answered. "I figured you had already gone the other way."

"To Richard? No way I was ever going with that crazy dude. I was in with Kohl and Sambo. Our plan was to stake out some turf for ourselves and try living off the land while the big dogs wore each other down. The guy from Nine was thinking about joining us too. But I didn't ditch my girl like they said to, and they tried to kill both of us. Had to leave her, or they would've gotten me too."

"Of course, and now I suppose you're thinking taking on another girl will improve your chances with the sponsors."

"Won't say it hasn't crossed my mind. Seems to me you're pretty low maintenance, anyway. Good with plants and things. Richard said you might even do some good in a fight."

"Did he." I managed not to snort. "So, where were you planning to go from here?"

"Figured there were two things to do. One, see about making a go of it here. Two, try and join up with the C'reers."

"Well, Hermes, I can tell you off the bat, Plan A isn't any good. I was about ready to try Plan B myself. That smell is my ticket in."

"What is it?"

"Physical evidence, of a major threat." Already, I was putting the foot very carefully into a discarded tent cover I had appropriated for a sack. I circled the tree as I climbed down, to make it harder for him to make an ambush. But he only stood back, looking as nonthreatening as he could while holding a hakapik.

"Let me see it," he said. I held up the bag. Something was oozing through the bottom. "All right, never mind. What do you want me to do?"

"Carry it," I said, "and you can look if you want." After a moment's thought, he tied the bag's drawstring around the hook of his hakapik.

I led the way down the valley, using my night glasses. The mist got thicker, which I could tell was because we were in the leading edge of the wind. Behind us, the mist was probably clearing. We could have waited, but for my purposes, it was better to move in while the mist was thickest.

The valley came to an end a hundred feet or so from the edge of the Circle and a little uphill. A covert approach to the circle was simply a matter of going around the last curve in the winding valley. I went first, leaving Fiver behind. Erne was on guard duty atop the pile. If I had seen Napoleon or especially Rook, I would have turned around and ran the other way. Rook was the kind to kill on sight, and Napoleon was the kind who would ask questions and shoot anyway, but Erne was mild-tempered enough to be approachable. Barely.

I went slower as I drew closer, and tried to make more noise. It looked like Erne might be asleep. As the wind wafted, I could smell the carrion distinctly, and I think that was what made Erne sit up and spot me. He raised his harpoon, and then I raised my hands. "Three," he called out. In an instant, Napoleon emerged from around the corner, wielding his bow.

"Are you here to beg for food?" he said in his imperious, nasal voice.

"No, I was doing just fine," I lied. "But you've probably noticed, so far hunger's been the least of our problems. I come with proof of a threat you don't know about. Not from another Tribute, but something else."

"Show me," he said.

I knew better than to haggle. I gave a signal, hoping the Fiver hadn't already run. I needn't have worried; he needed in the Careers more than I did, and besides, nobody would want to hold on to a three-day-old severed foot longer than he had to. He threw the bag, and the shoe fell out, and so did the foot.

He lowered his bow, a little. "So, you want into the pack?"

I smiled. "There's a saying where I come from... Girls who ask just look desperate."


	7. Career Pack

Life returns to Johanna's voice. Gale raises a hand to his chin to hide a look of concern as she recounts the tale of intrigue:

Up close, I could see Napoleon didn't just have night glasses, he had some kind of super high-tech visor, no doubt a gift from the folks at home in Three. I could see the lenses zoom in on the severed foot a hundred feet away. He finally relaxed his draw, though he makes a point of keeping bow and arrow ready. "Granting that you know of a threat," he said, "what do you have to offer me as a member of the Career pack?"

"I know about forests," I said. "I can help you find where the other Tributes are hiding."

"Can you?" he countered rhetorically. "It's my impression the whole idea of people from Seven being experts in forests is something of a myth. The way I hear it, the lumberjacks know little about forests except how to cut them down, and most women stay in the towns and work camps."

I knew the only safe option was to tell the truth. "You're right, for the most part," I said. "But I'm not most women. I come from a big family, and we couldn't afford to settle for what we could buy. I personally collect food and firewood. I spend as many hours of the day in the woods as most jacks, and I could learn at my leisure instead of clear-cutting it to the ground."

"I will grant you that in good faith," Napoleon said. "But this forest isn't like District Seven's, is it? Any knowledge or skills you may have picked up will be no more directly applicable here than fencing techniques to a wrestling match. It might even be a hindrance."

"You're right about one thing," I said. "This forest is nothing like Seven. It's nothing like anything anywhere, unless you count forests that were cut down thousands of years ago. But at least I can put a name to it: temperate old-growth coniferous forest. I can tell you the kinds of questions you need to answer to understand a forest. Most importantly, I was out there staying alive for the last three days, while you were here sitting on your butt!"

"Point taken," Napoleon said. "You are invited to join the Careers. Do you want your companion to join as well?"

"Yes," I said. "We haven't been together long, but I know he was good enough to find me. Besides which, we need as many people as we can get."

Fiver was guided in, and Ion served us breakfast. I could tell she was far from happy about it, but not about to complain. I guess in Two, they teach women early to be quiet and not complain. Still, just watching her told me the most important thing to know: The pack had been sitting still for too long. Napoleon might be content to sit on the food until everyone else starved or got mulched, but the others, even little Ion, had the look of jacks trying to finish their beer before they went outside to beat each other to a pulp. They were ready to kill, and if they didn't do it to other tributes out there, they were going to do it in here. I started to reconsider whether I wanted in, but it was too late for that.

Napoleon was as full of himself as his namesake as he pontificated about all the information he had gathered. "We have been able to track Ten's movements regularly. He has presented himself as confident and ready to fight. There was the stunt with the campfire, and yesterday, he ventured to approach us. But his movements tell a different story. At first, he ranged over half the Arena. But since the loss of one of his party, he has withdrawn steadily, toward the north end of the valley, in the range that would have been occupied by Twelve and Eleven." I nodded. That was precisely where I had last seen Sky.

"So what will you do?" I said. "Keep waiting here for him to attack, or starve first? Go in and chase him down?"

Napoleon shook his head. "A direct attack is obviously what he wants," he said. "He appears to believe that he has a means at least to oppose us on equal terms, and we cannot ignore the possibility that this might be true. What is more, a smaller party has innately greater mobility and flexibility in the face of attack. If they cannot best us in open battle, they can retreat, stage an ambush, or draw us into hazardous terrain."

"You're forgetting something, and there's something else I expect you never thought of at all," I told him. "What you forget is that the Gamemasters never tolerate standoffs like this, because the audience doesn't like to watch. When Tributes try to avoid each other, there's always a pack of Mutts or a flood or a fire or something that forces them back together. If you stay here, that's exactly what's going to happen."

"Oh, I have given that careful consideration," he said. "But a standoff is at least as much a risk for Ten as for us. Often, it is the weaker party that the Gamemasters strike at to force a confrontation. Then, if confrontation is the point, it would be entirely counterproductive to wipe us out. We have the advantages of numbers, strength and readiness; we can retain those advantages even in the face of a disaster."

"Well, then, have you considered this?" I told him. "Maybe Richard isn't the greatest threat to us. In fact, I'm sure he isn't."

"Who else is there? The girl from Nine? Or do you mean the boy who talks to angels?"

"That boy killed Kohl," I said. "I saw it myself. Trust me, if you went after him on his terms, you would die. But he could get a lot of us killed without doing a thing. You know how bad it can be when things get drawn out because one or two Tributes just lay low, and the Gamemasters keep pulling out crazier and crazier things, and people who should have had an equal chance in a fair fight just die bad. Now imagine the consequences for everyone else if there was one person the Gamemasters really had it in for, only the person was actually good enough to stay alive. Sometimes they do that, you know it. Choose one person, and single them out for tricks until they die, even if a few more are collateral damage. That's exactly what's happening now, and Sky is their target, and they don't care how many of us they kill. Remember those snakes? They were meant for _him_."

"Holy kaka," Napoleon said. "What in all hells did he do?"

I shrugged. "My best guess, he told the judges something an angel said to him."

"All right, I'm sold," Napoleon said. "It makes sense, anyway. Chances are, he's still somewhere north, in territory we have to cover to get to Ten." Then I knew, he still didn't understand. This wasn't us against Richard, or even us against Sky. It was a battle between the full power of the Gamemasters against whatever rested on Sky's shoulder, and we were going to lose.


	8. Little Lights

Johanna moves away from Gale. Her voice is calm, but her body is starting to shake. Gale gives a discrete signal, and the boradcast cuts to a recording, of Schuyler Grey's very brief interview with Cesar Flickerman.

"We're told you are very knowledgable about the forests in Seven," Cesar says, very delicately. "Do you consider this an advantage over competitors who are more skilled with weapons?"

"No matter," Sky says. "I have an angel on my shoulder."

Cesar starts to give the signal to end the interview then and there, but presses on. "So, you volunteered to replace your cousin's fiancee," Cesar says. "What were your feelings when you volunteered?"

"Happy. Get to do good for Mama and Jen and Jan. Make twelve lights for them."

"Excuse me?" Cesar says.

"Back home, lots of little lights in the sky. Mama say why. Everytime we do good, lights shine in the sky. Multiplies. Good for one, two lights. Good for two, six. Good for three, twelve."

Cesar tries to make a joke: "Well, there are lots of lights in the Capitol."

"Not in the sky," Schuyler says, leaning his head to one side. "Say it is because city lights are too bright." Then he smiles. "But Capitol is beautiful. Lots of people to talk to Good to talk to people. Good to have people listen." Flickerman kills the live feed, but the camera keeps rolling. "Angel on my shoulder tells me things. Sometimes I tell people, because Angel tells me to. Nobody listens. But then people in the Games let me talk, they listen. Very carefully."

Johanna and Gale return, and she is composed again. It is Gale who speaks. "It was known at the time that Schuyler Grey's appearance before the judges went very poorly," he says. "It was thought that he spoke out against the Capitol in some way. Unfortunately, there was a `reorganization' of the Gamemasters immediately following the 69th Games. Records were scrubbed, and even the full list of the judges present at his evaluation has been lost. Those who can be identified were all deceased before the general insurrection. Johanna, did you ever learn what happened?"

"Sky told me himself," she answers, "later..."

With me and Fiver added to the ranks, the Tribute I called Napoleon was finally confident enough to send people to search the woods. He made it an even split between those who went and those who stayed, and the ones he sent out were Erne, Fiver and me. I chose the route, and it was along the outside of the east ridge bounding the valley. I insisted that we all get some serious winter coats, and I convinced Napoleon to throw in binoculars and a half dozen good knives. I didn't feel too bad about it, because the one thing I knew we wouldn't find was Sky.

The mist was aleady pretty well cleared out, though the sky was still overcast, so it was easy to look around. What we mostly found were dead snakes. The cold was getting worse, and the rising winds were creating a major chill factor on the ridge especially, and the snakes just couldn't take it. I insisted on collecting ones that still looked fresh, throwing them over my shoulder like Sky did with his rope. I stopped after the fourth one turned out to be still alive. I had it over my shoulder with the others, under my collar, and I guess that warmed it up. I was walking along, when suddenly I felt a tickle across my neck. My first thought was that it was my hair- I wore it long then- and I reached up to brush it away, and instead I touched the tail, twitching. That was when I heard the hiss, and I grabbed that tail with both hands and swung, bam, bam, bam. They got a clip of that, and it was almost as popular as the one of me in the tree.

I wasn't the only one grabbing up frozen snakes. A couple times, we saw creatures that looked like something between a possum and a badger munching on snakes. I decided to make a point that I knew something about forests. "What we have here are middle-sized carnivores or omnivores, scavenging openly," I said. "Can anybody tell me what that means?"

"The big predators aren't around," Erne answered.

We went further along and further up, until I could see the crags of the pass in the middle distance. "We should stay away from there," I said, very quietly. "That's the edge of the Arena, and the Gamemasters never like it when people mess around there." Erne nodded, and we turned back.

We ventured a look into the valley. The air there was completely clear, and the wind was howling. The lunkheads were all together now, in a herd more than a hundred strong. They milled back and forth, demolishing any vegetation in their path, and leaving a trail of stripped, broken and uprooted bushes and trees. On the whole, it was a pathetic spectacle, but I didn't like the look of it. Still, I decided to keep my concerns to myself.

We ventured downhill after that, following my best guess of the trail Sky and I had followed. I called for a stop, and silence. I moved forward a bit, looked up with the binoculars, and spotted her. It was the girl from Eight, hanging from one of the low branches of one of the less big big trees. She was clearly after the cones that hung here and there from the branches. They were about six inches long and four wide, which was actually smaller than some I had seen. They were tightly shut, and I had figured they were immature, though they didn't look green. I could see where this was going: You can actually eat pine cones, or rather the nuts inside. The problem is, to get to the nuts, you have to either wait for the cone to open, or roast it over a fire. I started to wonder then if the stunt with the fire was about something more than bait. Then I noticed something else: The girl has a sharpened stick and a false-katniss root in her belt. I definitely didn't like this.

Erne and Fiver were already behind me, arguing about what to do. "We should follow her," Fiver said. "She could lead us to Richard."

"Take her alive," Erne said. "We can make her tell us." Already, the girl was scrambling back to the trunk, and around it. She looked every which way but our direction. I was about to shush the boys when we heard her scream. It was not for help, or even in pain, but a cry of utter terror and despair. At the same time, there was a dull thudding, like a giant in a leisurely jog. Then the scream ended in a moist crunch, and the cannon fired almost simultaneously. There were two more crunches, and then the thudding footfalls moved away, staying ahead of the approaching hovercraft.

**An after note: I have a complete draft of this story, and am thinking about posting less frequently from here on in. This chapter is the halfway point, and marks a bit of a shift in theme. I also decided to do a little song tie-in, to "All the Little Lights" by Passenger.**


	9. Nightfall

Johanna leans back with her eyes shut. "Right after... to me, it was the worst part..."

We could hear the hovercraft zigging and zagging, and I could still hear those big feet padding. That was when I heard Fiver behind me, just stepping a little closer. I whirled around and thrust. My knife went right in his heart, and he pitched backward with the hakapik still raised. The cannon sounded as he hit the ground. I dropped to my knees, ready to dodge Erne's harpoon, but he just stood there, looking at me. He pressed a finger to his lips and thrust his harpoon straight through where my knife had been. We didn't need to say anything. He knew my biggest secret, and he was going to keep it. We could hear a second hovercraft coming, and retreated. I took the hakapik with me.

We got back to the Circle, and they hardly asked any questions about Fiver. Even the tale of Eight's demise brought only passing interest. Napoleon showed the most concern at the detail of the stake and poisonous false-katniss root that the girl had collected. "I believe we can deduce something of his strategy, and it is an promising one," he said. "It would appear that Ten and his party have arrived at a primitive but potentially very effective form of biological warfare: the application of a natural toxin to otherwise marginal weapons. If the root is sufficiently toxic, and we can assume Ten has tested its properties firsthand, one scratch of a sharpened stick might kill within seconds. Poisoned darts from a blowgun would be especially devastating, though the grasses normally used to make such weapons appear to be conspicuously absent from the arena."

"You're right," I said, "I haven't seen anything like reeds, even by the lake. It looks like you were right about something else: The Gamemasters struck against 10 first. The Mutt coming out of the valley had to be their doing, one way or another. Though, the idea might have been more along the lines of the Mutt lunching Sky and then going after Richard. What are you going to do now, Napoleon?"

I let my nickname for him slip without thinking about it, and he seemed to take it as a compliment. "For now, we continue to wait," he said. "There is no need to be concerned about action by the Gamemasters. At this point, the Gamemasters' primary concern will be preparing for the Final Eight broadcasts, during which they always prefer for the remaining Tributes to take a breather. By your own evaluation, their most likely action at this point will be to make another attempt to eliminate your fellow Tribute, this time without endangering anyone else." I nodded. I was sure the Gamemasters don't want to have to say anything more about Sky, and they don't normally like to come up short in the interviews. But by then, I suspected they would take the former over the latter.

A bevy of parachutes came in at dusk. Rook got a vest that looked like winter gear, and promptly put it on over his coat. Napoleon got more arrows, Erne received a net, and Ion got a blowtorch that she used to start our campfire. My gift was a loaf of unfamiliar bread. Ion took one look at it and said, "That's a gift from Eleven." That rattled me, even before I saw everyone looking at me.

"What?" I said. "It's not my business who sends me things."

Napoleon said curtly, "You were the one who killed off Eleven."

I nodded. "He and Kohl came after me. He was in the rear, and I doubled back and got him by surprise."

"What about Twelve?"

"Sky got him, like I said," I answered, and I knew I had to give them a mostly full account which I'd been holding back. "He set a rope snare, and Kohl got caught in it while he was trying to kill me. Then Sky killed him just by cutting the rope. I saw it happen. The weirdest thing was, Sky talked with his angel about what to do first. But how do you get to there from Eleven sending me a loaf of bread? Wouldn't they want me to lose?"

Ion laughed. "It always happens," she said. "You know how it is in the poor Districts: They hold big drives in advance to gather money to support their Tributes. It's never enough, but usually, both Tributes are dead before it runs out. What do you think they do with the extra money? They send it to a Tribute who killed the last of theirs, and sometimes to the Tribute that killed him. It comes down to wounded pride, I guess, like losing to the Victor is the next best thing to having a Victor."

I didn't react, but I knew what she said was true. I had never heard of how collections money got spent, but the rest, I knew better than she did. Every year at Games time, a good part of whatever money was to be had in the towns and camps went straight into sponsoring our Tributes. No racket was easier or more rewarding than a phony collection drive; except, so great was the pull of the Games that even hardened cons would cave in and donate for real, at least after taking "expenses" off the top. I had seen it happen. I also had seen- and felt- firsthand the way attention and a certain amount of sympathy would focus on a Tribute who killed one of ours, especially one from another "underdog" District. I could have told Ion myself what really went on deep down in our minds: Somehow, losing a tribute to the Victor, no matter how early in the Game, meant that ours could have been the victor, and next year... Only then did I think what it must be like for the people at home, having not one but two tributes still in at the brink of the Final Eight, and for the first time I truly wished Sky had stayed home.

My thoughts were interrupted by a bright flash. I turned around as the thunder of a lightning bolt reached us. Another bolt struck, right at the far end of the valley, so bright I was momentarily blind. I covered my eyes instinctively, and sure enough, a third bolt struck. When I looked, I saw the trunk of one of the biggest trees on fire and split top to bottom, and several more ablaze. Then there was another flash, not from another bolt but something like a low-flying meteor: ball lighting.

The ball lightning, a distant spark to me, struck a tree and exploded, splintering the trunk. I snapped up the binoculars. There was another ball, and another, and two at once, and by their light, I could see a scrawny stick figure running away. One last ball came flying, moving like a curveball, and I could see it change course to follow the stickman's zig and zag. Still, he ran on those stick legs, and I was sure that somehow he knew there was a place to run to. Sure enough, the ball stopped at an invisible boundary, but it burst explosively, slamming the stickman to the ground. I knew what it would be like for Sky, half-blind and half-deaf and maybe burned, watching a forest burn.

Then I panned with the binoculars. At least a dozen trees were burning, not like the torches I had seen in dry secondary growth, but strongly and steadily. Pools of dull flame were rising in the the patchy litter, and already, another tree was starting to burn. Then I looked to the valley, where the vegetation was denser and a cold wind had been sucking moisture all day. I didn't see the flames, but from below the ridge came an orange glow.

"We have to move!" I shouted. Too late. Already, the herd of lunkheads was surging out of the valley, and I didn't doubt for a moment that the vagaries of the terrain, the spreading fire and the animals' behavior would lead the stampede straight for us.


	10. Stampede

Johanna begins to rock in her seat. Gale cues to go to a clip, A panorama of a burning Arena.

It took a bit of time for the others to react. They were watching the herd of lunkhead reptiles by the light from the fires, just to see if it really went for us, and I started to doubt myself. I shouldn't have. The mass of the lunkheads went back and forth a bit, but when they reached a loop of the stream, they made a decisive turn straight for us. At least they weren't moving that fast. They were quicker than I would have thought, running with their sprawling reptile legs more than half-straightened and their big barrel rib cages going in and out like bellows, but still no faster than a healthy man or woman.

Napoleon tried shooting at a big lunkhead in the lead. It had bigger horns than the others, probably a bull. The arrow just lodged in the armor plates on its back. He had at least had the sense to gather his arrows and grab a pack of food. Rook was still just standing there, though he was probably debating whether to take out Napoleon, which certainly wouldn't have been the worst idea. But Erne, he did the single stupidest thing I had ever seen: He ran forward, and cast his harpoon at the leader, with the weapon still tied to a rope around his waist.

I suppose it's a little unkind to say he was stupid. He did hit the bull, just behind a shoulder blade, and I think the blade got through the armor. If the angle had been a little different, he might have gotten between the ribs, done some major damage and even brought the thing down. But he could have done the math on what would happen if it didn't work, which went something like, 600 pounds of lunkhead times 10 miles per hour plus 200 pounds of human equals totally mulched. Still, he might have gotten out alive if he had cut the rope. But he got jerked off his feet, and tangled up in his own rope, and then he went under the rest of the herd. I could just hear the cannon over the squawks of the lunkhead.

"Come on!" I shouted. I had a pack, with the dead snakes and bread from the people of Eleven whose Tribute I had pretty much murdered, my hatchet and knives and a hakapik. For a wonder, everyone decided that getting away from the herd was at least somewhat more urgent than killing each other or me. So they ran, and Rook overtook me. Behind us, the herd hit the pile, and even in their panic, they did what came naturally. I ventured a look over my shoulder and laughed at the sight of one lunkead pulling with its beak and another slashing with its tusks to tear open a big plastic carton. Grain spilled out, and they gobbled in unison without so much as a squawk at each other, and once again, I knew who the real survivors were. But the Gamemasters would be sure to kill them, too.

We reaches a good-sized stream, and Rook looked ready to jump in. "Don't!" I shouted. "Hypothermia will kill you before the fire gets near us." We kept running, slowing to a jog as we approached the lake. Behind us, the herd was catching up, but I stopped and waved them back. I gestured with the hakapik at what looked at a glance like a shallow hole full of leaf litter. On examination, it was full of snakes. Congregations just like it could be seen everywhere along the lake shore. They would be dormant, at least some of them, surviving off pooled body heat until the temperature was high enough to become active again. Of course, things were going to get a lot warmer very soon.

Napoleon took a good look, and smiled. "That's a problem for you," he said, "not for us. We received antivenom. We're immune."

"Ever survive a forest fire?" I countered. "Didn't think so. A problem for me is a problem for you. Besides, do you really think the Gamemasters would make it that easy? They could have released two different species. I was thinking, some of the dead ones I saw looked a little different. They could have given you a drug whose effects were temporary. They could have stocked the lake with a threat we don't know about."

"Very well, guide, where do you propose we go?"

"Up there," I said, pointing to a slight but rocky rise in the terrain. "If the lunks come up after us, it will be by ones and twos." They followed my advice, just in time. The herd went around us on either side. When one slow bull lumbered up, Rook ran it through with the point of his polearm, and I finished it off with the hakapik, driving the axe-like end of the head into a seam in the center of its forehead.

"Now what?" Ion said.

"We make ourselves as comfortable as we can," Napoleon said, "while the Gamemasters get their Final Eight interviews. Oh, and I want to see those snakes."

I laid them out beside a modest campfire we had made, and set about cleaning and skinning them. What I had said about two species had been all bluff on my part, but it turned out one of them did look different: The one I had bashed had the same alternating rusty red and light brown bands as the others, but the red bands were wider and tinged orange at the edges. I knew that it could mean nothing more than a difference in hair color on a human, and if it was a different species it might not be venomous. (Fortunately or otherwise, there wasn't enough left of the head to check for the fangs or glands.) Still, it had stood up to the cold better than the other snakes, and I wouldn't have floated my story if it wasn't the kind of thing the Gamemasters might try, so for the moment, I held Napoleon's trust.

Erne's face played in the sky. I would find out later that his death was another of the most replayed moments of the Games. They played up the angle that he sacrificed himself to protect me. If that was what he had in mind, then he was stupider than he looked. I got myself out just fine, and if he had really wanted to help, he should have followed me instead of leaving me with the three people I trusted least. But then, that whole angle could have been the Capitol's way of sending a message about what a heroic stand really gets you.

One of the things I had taken care to save was a package of salt. I cut the snake flesh into long, thin strips and poured the salt on. They smoked nicely over the fire, making jerky we could save for later. "Ten will be making his way down to us," Napoleon said. "We can expect him to attack shortly."

"No," I said. "I already told you you the greatest threat is. Sky is still alive, despite the Gamemasters' best efforts, and we can only imagine what they will try next. But he's not going to be okay. He could have burns or a concussion. He could be off-balance for a while. Most importantly, even if he is as good as ever, he won't have the forest on his side anymore. Any snares he set will be burned up or exposed, edible plants will be burned up, along with any cover, and the animals will be dead or scared away. For the time being, he will be up around the rocky peaks where the fire had nothing to burn, and probably holed up in a cave for warmth. We can take him, if we get to him fast, and we can. By morning, the fires in the valley will be burning themselves out. We can get there ahead of the big, slow burn, and follow the valley up to where he is."

As I said it, I thought of Sky, and I knew I deserved to die for this. But I also thought of Row, Jan and Jen, the people he came here to help, and I knew if Sky lived, they would not. I tried to convince myself I was doing it for them.

**An after note: This chapter is based on an event referenced in the first book. The lunkheads are an original creation I have had fun with; my main inspiration was the pareiasaurs, among my favorite prehistoric creatures, and I added some dinosaurian and crocodilian elements. While I'm at it, I'll mention that in place of an installment of this story, I posted a Johanna one-shot called "Progress", which came out as pretty much pure cuteness.**


	11. Scorched Earth

Johanna sighs and raises her hand, "Don't worry, Gale. I can do this... I need to do this. It won't take much longer..."

That night, I had another dream. I was looking down on the fairy-tale village I had seen in the illusory countryside beyond the force field. Days and nights passed in time-lapse, but not so quickly that I could not see the little people going about, helping each other in all kinds of little ways. Then every night, just like in the fable I had heard and Sky really believed, the stars came out, multiplied by every good deed the people did for each other, until the night sky was as bright as day.

Then the time came when a great city appeared overnight in the distance, and I recognized the towers of the Capitol, except that there were no lights by night. Merchants came, offering special gifts to the people, and there was great celebration when they built a railroad to the village. But then the merchants started demanding a price, higher and higher, and the people grew poorer despite what they bought, and they did less and less good for each other. Then uniformed soldiers came with the merchants, and they simply took, and the people could not resist, and forced the people to build a great wall. Then, instead of doing good, they began stealing and cheating and killing to take more of what little they had left or simply because hurting each other was the only thing they had the power to do. Then with every foul deed, a star in the night sky fell upon the city, to shine from its towers. Soon, the city shone bright as day, but the sky over the village was pitch dark, because the people could not see it over the wall they slaved to build.

Then I saw Sky's angel, only this time it wasn't just giant, it was as tall as the mountains it hovered between, looking down on the village. The mantle that had covered its body was unfurled as a set of wings that spead wider that the valley between the crags. It flitted forward, following a train to the great city, and there it stopped, and floated, and the light that shone was brighter than all the city's lights, though the hood and a second mantle still covered it. Then part of the second mantle drew back, covering an arm, and from where the hand would be, there came a flaming sword...

I woke up then, and I felt damp as well as cold. Snow had fallen during the night, and now the sky was clear, except where the smoke still rose from burning trees, but a strong wind blew it northeast. The snow had mixed heavily with soot, but there was still a blinding glare off of it. I knew it would be torment for Sky, and of course, we would be able to see his tracks. It was murder, pure and simple, and I was being entrusted to do it.

As we set out, a cannon sounded, and a hovercraft headed for the highlands. Napoleon looked at me, and I shook my head, and he nodded in agreement: too easy. Then he pointed to something else: From somewhere in the valley came a column of smoke. We made our approach along the west edge of the circle, where the injured and stragglers from the herd were hobbling around shivering. One bull charged us, and Napoleon brought it down with an arrow to the suture in its head. He called a halt and stooped where the lunkheads had clawed up the earth. A few scraps of vegetation had been exposed, but left untouched. He held up a clump of false-katniss roots. He thoroughly anointed every one of his arrows with the juice of the root, and applied some to the point and horizontal hook of the head of Rook's polearm. When we approached another lunkhead, a little one with a maimed leg, Rook gave a slash with his hook. The lunkhead gave one strangled squawk from a foaming mouth and slammed down headfirst, pounding its head into the earth as it convulsed.

As I led the way toward the mouth of the valley, I saw something in my binoculars, and my first thought was that what I beheld was a stocky terrier digging at the base of a tree. Then my eyes adjusted for the proportions of the 200-foot tree, and I realized that the creature before me had to be as big as the oxen the jacks used to haul trees in places where the trucks couldn't go. It turned its head, revealing long and- relatively- narrow jaws lined with fangs and shearing molars that looked eerily like a possum's. It gave an eerie, high-pitched shriek, and an answering cry seemed to come from the valley. At any rate, the Mutt turned around and jogged out of sight.

Needless to say, nobody was hurrying to move in, but I advanced, waving for the others to follow. "It was digging for something," I said. "I want to know what it is." They followed a little faster. It became clear that this was not simply a hole that the Mutt had dug itself. It took just a moment for me to know its true source. "It's one of Sky's traps! He dug a pit and caught something."

I approached the pit, a hard wide and deeper than I could tell. I could see remnants of a frame of sticks that would have held up a screen of loose leaves to hide the hole, which was too big for Sky to have dug himself. I looked down, and finally called out, "Is anyone down there?"

A quavering voice answered, "I'm Lee Odama. From Nine."

"We were wondering about you. How long have you been here?"

"Three days. I think. I had a pack of food, but it's out."

I almost laughed. She had lasted to the Final Eight stuck in a hole in the ground. What was funny to me was that it was _not_ surprising. When we had to go into the woods to rescue someone, we always have the best chances with the ones who get stuck, because they stay in one place and don't get themselves into any worse trouble. Too bad about Niner. "Has anyone been here?"

"Yes. The skinny boy from your District. He was talking to the angel on his shoulder about whether to let me out. He said the angel told him no, because I was bad."

Almost on impulse, I called to the others, "Bring a rope." After a moment, Rook complied. As I lowered the rope, I said, "Well, Niner, this is your lucky day. Right now, we're all together, looking for the same boy who left you here, and I bet you'd love to join in." I reached out a hand to help her up.

"Thank you," she said. "The boy, he left me this." She held up a root. "It looks like katniss. But it's not, is it?" I shook my head and turned back. That was when she came straight for me.

I had my knife out even before she took a step, but she managed to get inside my reach. I caught her knife hand, and she caught mine. Her weapon was pitiful, barely an inch, and her technique was worse, but her blade was undoubtedly poisoned, and she had sheer crazy on her side. Rather than try to outwrestle her, I lunged in and bit her ear. Actually, as everyone knows, I bit the better part right off, and I didn't spit it out. Then she screamed "NO!" so loud it almost threw me off. She actually let go of my hand and clutched at her ear. She kept holding her hand to her head and screaming "No!" as I drove home and even after, like she was less upset about dying than being an unpretty corpse.

The worst part was, people still joke about how Seven ate Nine.

**An after note: The opening paragraphs of this story corresponds to the complete form of the sketch I used for the "cover", which I originally created for an all-original story. It's a very old concept of mine, and I enjoy bringing it out from time to time. The Mutt is another prehistoric-type creature that I envisioned as some combination of three extinct creatures most people have never heard of: Andrewsarchus, Hyaenodon, and the thylacine.**


	12. The Valley of Death

Johanna's eyes are open again, and her voice is calm, perhaps relieved. "You're going to cut, like, 90% of this, right?" she says with a nervous smile. "I know I'm going on way too long, but really, I'm almost done..." Gale gives a noncommital shrug, and then a nod to continue, and he looks at her, concerned but accepting that her tale is one she needs to tell.

When the Niner girl went down, I looked up at the others. Napoleon had his bow out and drawn, and it obviously hadn't been to help me. He looked Niner over carefully, like he was inspecting a piece of busted hardware. I had cut her up bad, worse than I had to, just to hide how precisely I had dealt the blows that really mattered. Napoleon let the string relax, but kept the bow at ready. "Let's go," he said curtly.

We moved into the valley, knee deep in what looked to be just about equal parts snow and ash. We stayed in a perfect line, and tried to follow the deep prints of the Mutt, but the trail was irregular, suggesting that the Mutt had meandered up onto the rocks, and it was big enough that it was quite conceivable it would step right over a human-sized trap. Of course, I was in front, but I insisted Rook test any spot I thought looked iffy with the haft of his polearm. It was very slow going, and Napoleon got very impatient, but when a jab with the pole caved in a patch of snow that even I was 95% sure was nothing, they got more attentive.

As we rounded the first bend, I saw him, highstepping away with a greatcoat trailing behind him in the wind like a cape. If Sky looked like a human coatrack before, now he looked like a walking skeleton. It was my first clue to what would become poignantly clear later, that our boy in the woods had had a lot of help from the rest of us. Without the charity of others, he had been quick to waste away, but still, he ran as quickly and nimbly as ever. He was almost to the next bend as the others caught up to me. He snatched up a torch that burned on the edge of a ridge. "Shoot him!" I called to Napoleon. He fired, but the shot was wide and too late. Sky cast down the torch, igniting a larger fire below, and descended out of sight.

The ground was getting rocky, so we ventured forward more quickly, staying on the far side of the valley from the fire. I stopped long enough to throw a rock at a suspicious pile of debris, and set off a rockslide that still nearly got me. I scrambled straight ahead over the unsettled debris, and nearly got swept away as the stuff slipped and skidded under my feet. Still, I made it, and I turned back like I was just fine and shouted, "_Come __on__!_"

As we approached the bend, an 18-inch wooden dart came flying, and hit Rook in the chest. His new "coat" stopped it, barely. The quilted padding turned out to be a dense ballistic foam. "It does insulate," he said as he pulled out the dart. Napoleon said nothing, keeping his attention on the ridge.

"That wasn't our quarry, it was Ten," he said. "He must have improvised a spear thrower. He may have made an alliance with Seven, though I think it's unlikely. For now, our main order of business is getting around the next bend. The slope on this side doesn't look stable, and we still don't know what that fire is for."

I was using the binoculars to check that very thing, examining what looked like a shallow pile of unburnt underbrush beside the fire. "I can tell you that," I said. "There's a snake pit there, maybe ones he collected himself. The fire is warming them up. Oh, and it's the ones with the different bands."

We tried to skirt the snakes, but the whole mass of them stirred at our approach, and then a rockslide came down, forcing us closer as the snakes started to fan out in alarm. Even on the move, they kept together, just to keep their body heat pooled. Rook and Napoleon ran ahead before the swarm could advance very far, leaving us ladies to deal with a virtual torrent of snakes across our path. "Turn on the torch and wave it back and forth!" I told Ion. "They sense heat; it will either distract them or drive them off!"

Ion did as I said, waving the lit torch at the leading edge of the mass. A few snakes struck at the flame, but most drew back. It was the opening I needed to make a couple sweeps with the hakapik and clear a path. "Come on! Don't stop!" I told her. I was clear, but a couple snakes were following me, so I hacked one before it could go for my ankle. Maybe that was what gave Ion the idea to jab at a snake with her torch. Really bad idea. The snake practically jumped at her and latched onto her wrist. It got in another solid bite while she was trying to get it off. Her hand was already swelling like an inflated rubber glove. A second snake got her in the ankle. It probably wasn't a good idea for me to say, "I told you so."

She came at me, swinging the snake by the tail with the hand that wasn't the size of a melon. I drove the hook of the hakapik right in her chest, but the snake got me across the left ear. Right away, I got this numb feeling, and I let go of the hakapik. I turned around and saw Rook coming at me. I drew a knife and threw. I'm very, very, very good at knife throwing, which means I could have about a 10% chance of hitting someone in real combat conditions. This time, I scored a one in a thousand shot, right in the throat. He could still have easily run me through, if he had let momentum and adrenaline take over the way Ion had. Instead, he halted in his tracks, like he was just too surprised to do anything else. Then the moment was gone, and he just dropped.

Napoleon turned back and snapped off an arrow at me as the cannon fired. I dived out of the way behind an outcropping, trying to look like I was on the verge of passing out. It was a nice trick, and I had practiced it often enough. I pressed my ear into the snow in the bargain, because cold can help. When I didn't get up, he walked closer. I waited, not daring to move. Already, I had lost all feeling in my ear, and my cheek was starting to swell despite the snow. I was doing the math that mattered: The bite had been barely a nick, and the snake had probably used most of its load on Ion. I could probably stay conscious for a few hours, if I kept moving. That was the key, momentum and adrenaline, and I knew if I had to spend more than a minute or two horizontal, I would pass out for real, and I would be gone for good within the hour.

Napoleon stopped, and I moved my head just enough to get a glimpse of what he was doing. He had stooped over Ion, and came up with her torch, of all things. He looked back at me, and I lowered my head. I heard his bow string draw, start to relax, and then pull back again. Finally, he walked away. I drew myself into a crouch as his footsteps receded, then I sprang up. I almost fell on my face right there, but I steadied myself on the outcropping. I could have tried to retrieve the hakapik or even take off Rook's vest, but I was afraid I would pass out if I bent over. So I just trudge through the snow, trying to keep my pace at a brisk walk, aroud the bend. I stopped at the sound of voices, and leaned out to see Napoleon with his arrow drawn, facing Richard. His rival had a dart over his shoulder, in a leather sling that I realized was his token, supposedly a bridle strap. His chest was covered by the the armored hide of a lunkhead.

"Well," Napoleon said, "it would appear we have a choice: Fire at each other, and possibly leave both of us dead. Or- for the moment- we can join together and take down the real enemy."

**An after note: I'm going to come out and say, I am absolutely convinced that Suzanne Collins knows nothing about knife throwing. This chapter represents my best effort to harmonize what I know of it with the "received mythology" of the books, but I'm still quite sure it's well beyond anything realistic.**


	13. End Games

Johanna leans back again. "So, the two big boys were facing down each other's weapons, ready to decide whether to fire then and there or go after Sky. Then the first thing Richard says is..."

"Final four, and not one left from the C'reer districts," Richard said. His usual drawl had thickened almost to unintelligbility. "That's gotta be a first."

"It is," said Three. "Though it won't be four for long. A snake got the Seven girl."

"Too bad. She was good. Wouldn't've minded losing to her."

"Well, Ten, are you willing to join me? Or do you feel obliged to honor a prior commitment?"

"Wasn't never on his side," Richard said through clenched teeth. "Nobody was. But he caught me and he let me go. He... he said the `angel' told him there were things I was still meant to do. I thought... I mean, o' course, I didn't think there was no angel, but how coulda he have gotten on as long as he has if there wasn't _something_... I thought, maybe, I was meant to keep one of the girls alive, an' I tried, so hard, at least to hold onto Kay... It was the fire. I kept her alive till morning, and I actually still hoped... I coud kill 'im, jus' for that."

"Then we want the same thing," Napoleon said. "Let's go..." Then they marched off, taking turns in the lead just like Kohl and the dark boy, and I followed. I even managed to keep pace as they went around a bend and up another leg of the valley, and finally to the last turn into the final approach to the pass, At a choke point halfway, Sky was waiting, looking down from the left from an outcropping about eight feet high. The two new allies followed to just outside of striking range, and then moved to either side, Napoleon following the valley wall on the left and Richard climbing up higher. Sky jumped down and ran across the choke point. Both Napoleon and Richard fired, and the dart and the arrow landed in the snow to either side. He jumped over Napoleon's arrow and ran uphill and out of sight on the right.

Richard clambered forward and upward, while Napoleon broke into a run. He went right past the outcropping where Sky had been standing, and that was when the Mutt lunged out and caught him by the leg. It was playing with him, I suppose, and its idea of play was to rear up on its hind legs, bringing its whole head above the outcropping, give a good shake, and throw Napoleon about ten feet up and thirty feet along, minus about two-thirds of his right calf. He landed on a snow-covered ledge at just about peak trajectory. Even so, I was amazed when the cannon did not go off.

At this point, it definitely crossed my mind that it would probably be best to keep my distance and hope the boys and the Mutt took care of things before the snake venom could finish me off. Then a hovercraft would pick me up, and the Capitol would do whatever they had to heal me. I had seen other Victors brought back from worse. But I had that momentum factor to think about, and I might need to finish somebody off if I was going to be the living Victor instead of the last one to die like I would be anyway if this was _really_ for real. Besides, I really wanted to see how this went down.

Moving forward wasn't too risky, as the Mutt was now after Richard. It followed him along an upper ledge, jumping up on its hind legs and scratching like a dog wanting to be let in. One of his darts was in its shoulder, and it looked like there was a trickle of foam forming at its yawning cheek, but there was no sign that the poison was going to work very fast, and with the Mutt almost directly below, he couldn't make another throw effectively. I followed a fairly gentle rise on the right that Sky must have used, reaching the ledge behind Richard. I looked over my shoulder at some kind of hissing sound. All I saw was some snow tumbling off the ledge where Napoleon had landed. There was no trace of him there any more.

Richard kept making his way along the ledge, with the Mutt still following. Sky beat a retreat, until he was at the edge of the precipice. Behind him, there was a flash as an arrow hit the force field. Streaks of light ran up the invisible dome like shooting stars in reverse, and where they intersected, twinkling points of light lingered a moment longer. Of course, I was paying more attention to where the arrow came from. Incredibly, fantastically, ridiculously, I spotted Napoleon, not only alive and mobile, but still in possession of his bow and a few arrows, crawling his way up onto the peak opposite Sky. Richard jumped and hauled himself up behind Sky. For a moment, I was afraid the Mutt would come for me, but it stayed under Richard. Maybe it was attracted to that armor he improvised from the lunkhead.

So there was Sky, with nowhere to go but down and no weapon but his big, curved knife. Napoleon managed to rise to a kneeling position, like he was proposing, only there was nothing left below his right knee but a stump he had cauterized with the torch. Richard drew back his arm to cast a dart, and Napoleon readied an arrow. I moved in a bit closer, and looked with my binoculars, and saw Sky grinning like the Grim Reaper.

"Whatever else happens," Richard called out, "there's one thing we gotta know... What in all hells did you _do?_"

"Angel said, volunteer, because we go to Capitol," he said. "Go to Capitol, because the angel has message for people there. Go to judges, and I did what the angel told me to do to make them listen when I tell them angel's message. Then I tell them what the angel says..."

Then he said what the Capitol had decided to kill him for, and I had the feeling that I was the one meant to hear. Then I knew that even if I was the one who got out of here alive, I would never really get out of here, because I would know something the Gamemasters would kill for, and they would know I knew it. No matter what else happened, they would know, and they would never let me go.


	14. The Prophesied Doom

It is Gale who speaks: "At the time, there were already stories... legends, really, except they were consistent. It was reported that Schuyler Grey didn't just criticize the Capitol before the judges of the Games, he made a prophesy. Some accounts even say that it was about Katniss Everdeen. But any hard information was hidden or erased. Johanna, only you can tell us, what did he say?"

Tears spring up in Johanna's eyes. "All I can say is what he told us he told the judges, and I already said what his memory was like," she says. "The stories... they aren't wrong, but they aren't the whole truth, and nobody really understands. They like to think of a boy who said he had an angel on his shoulder confronting the Gamemasters. They don't know, and I think they don't want to know, the rest..."

Napoleon and Richard kept their aim on Sky as he talked, Napoleon with a poisoned arrow and and Richard with an equally poisoned wooden stake, while a one-ton Mutt looked up like a puppy under the table, and I pressed myself against a cliff face, quietly dying of snake venom, listening and hoping nobody really noticed me.

Napoleon looked like he was debating whether to shoot, but I could tell Richard wanted to hear every word. But Sky just kept talking, smiling. "Brought a snake with us, like angel says, to show men at the table," he said, and he stroked the snake that the Gamemasters had sent to kill him, still on his shoulder,. That much definitely sounded right. "Carry snake. Pet snake. Play with snake. Feed snake. Then men pay attention. They listen to what angel says. Good to have people listen. Usually don't. I tell them what angel says, and they listen very carefully."

Then he turned his head, and there was a change in his speech like night and day: _"`You stand in judgment on children, but powers you do not know stand in judgment on you. You light your city to outshine the stars, but your deeds darken the Heavens. You have built your mansions on foundations of greed and fear and hate, but they will burn at the beat of a mockingjay's wings...'"_ I swear, that's exactly what he said, and you can bet I remembered it when Katniss came along.

"_`You are not being told this so you might change. You will not, because you have already darkened your hearts, and the true light by which you might save yourselves, even for no better purpose than your own selfishness, has been cut off from you. You are being told, so your children's children will know, that __you were warned__. They will know, so that they might learn to deal with kindness instead of treachery, and govern with justice instead of oppression, and make lights in the Heavens instead of fires on Earth. Then if they do not learn, woe unto them, for where your fall will set this city to flame, __**theirs shall melt the very foundations from beneath it.**__'"_

"Holy kaka," Richard said. "You're dead, man. You were dead before you got in the tube. You're lucky we're going to kill you."

"Yes," Napoleon said, "but what about us?" Then he and Richard fired together- at each other. Richard went down with an arrow in his forehead, already foaming at the mouth. Napoleon, down on one stump, drew another arrow, and then looked down with a sigh at the wooden dart that had just pricked the toe of his remaining boot.

"Oh," he said, oddly calm as his leg spasmed and then stiffened, "to fock with it all." Then he braced his back against the outcropping behind him and shifted his bow, to aim directly at me. Right at that moment, a swatch of ice and rock dropped from the crag beneath him. His truncated right leg slipped, and he pitched forward headfirst. The Mutt leaped and caught him in the air, crushing his skull at one bite. Then Napoleon's headless corpse dropped to the ground, and the Mutt sailed forward, between the peaks, and straight into the force field. The whole sky flashed with crisscrossing lines of fire that faded into points of lights like stars in the sunset sky.

For a moment, I just stared down, literally in disbelief. Then, remembering that I needed adrenaline and momentum, I tried making my way along the ledge, toward Sky. I almost made it, but when I reached the end where I had to pull myself up, I could hardly keep from falling off the cliff. Actually, I couldn't. I started to fall forward, and for a moment, I was happy for it. But then a hand caught hold of my arm, and Sky hauled me up.

The air stank of burned flesh, and there were big flakes of ash floating around. The Mutt hadn't been incinerated on impact, but the charred carcass the field had hurled back was little more than a skeleton. "Too bad," Sky said, looking down. "I liked it." Of course he would have.

He set me down with my back upright against a trunk. "Little lights," he said, looking directly into my eyes. "Millions of little lights shining in the dark." He pointed to the setting sun, and then up, where I thought I could make out a few stars. It was hard to tell, because it might be residual flash from when the force field lit up from the Mutt, plus I was seeing stars anyway. Momentum and adrenaline had kept me going, but they had taken a lot out of me too. I knew I didn't have long.

I knew something else then, what the prophecy was really about. Predicting the rebellion didn't mean anything. Anyone with an ear to the ground could have seen that it was a matter of when, not if. Even the mockingjay bit was nothing special. It was a symbol going back to the Dark Days, and if one of the rebel factions didn't come up with it in the first place, then they had been using it on and off for about as long as it had been around. None of that was the point. The point was about us.

We could hate the Capitol for how they treated us, and sure, they deserved it. We could even tell ourselves we would do things different if we were in charge. But in the end, the only difference between the Capitol and us was that we were on the sharp end of the stick. If we had the chance, we could do worse evil than the Capitol ever did, and we would have less excuse. Nobody knew it better than someone like me, and nothing proved it better than how the people who thought themselves decent and upright had treated Sky. And if we were sane and he was not, maybe it was time to give crazy a chance.

I wish I could say I really thought about it.

"Yeah," I said, "there's lots of little lights... But they all burn out." Then I reached for a knife.

**An after note: I actually have a degree from seminary, and this chapter reflects my ideas about Biblical prophecies. For another take on apocalyptic predictions, see "Cassandra" in the Terminator fandom.**


	15. Fly Away Home

Johanna is sobbing openly, though the sound is more like dry heaves. "I'm sorry," she says. "I know all of this is a write-off. Let's just wrap and go home."

Gale presses a hand to her shoulder. "It's okay," he said. "We're all here for you, and you've come this far, so finish it." She nods, and hugs him, but she does not speak. "How about I give you the recap? After five days, it was down to you and a boy with an angel on his shoulder that the Capitol had marked to die. You both knew the consequences if he was the one who lived; the people he fought for would suffer and die, just to punish him." She nods, and resumes, but her narrative skips:

When they picked me up in the hovercraft, the first thing they did was inject me with something, and my head cleared fast. The first thing I was aware of was a voice. I didn't pick up words, but I knew the voice, and when I looked up, I saw that he was really aboard.

"Good evening, Ms. Mason, and congratulations," President Snow said. "Normally, I would meet you at the Victory Ceremony, but on this occasion, I felt it was best to have an immediate, private meeting. I must say, I hoped you would be the one to win."

"Why not skip the pleasantries?" I said. "Why not just tell me what you're going to do if I talk? Hurt my family? Oh, right, they're dead already."

"Talk about what, Ms. Mason?" Snow said. "For us to want to silence you, you would have to have something to say that would cause us the slightest concern. I should think it would take more than what a teenage girl might claim to have heard from a young man who claimed to talk to angels, and people will certainly think so if you speak and we merely say and do nothing. Things are rather easier that way, don't you think? And a great deal tidier." That was it. We would meet quite a few times after that. He always knew I was the one person he knew he couldn't intimidate out of telling the truth, and I think he actually got to like me.

There was a month of celebration in Seven after I got back from the Games. But my last ha'cousin and her jack, and her 3-year-old niece and my 12-year-old ha'nephew weren't there. The peacekeepers said ir was one of our old marks who recognized her from the Final Eight interview. If the guy they hanged didn't do it, there were a dozen like him who could have. Over the next few months, the same kind of thing happened to a lot of the people I had at least an acquaintance with. It would almost be nice if it was Snow's revenge, like people think, but they don't understand what Seven was like, or the kind of life I had been living. Make no mistake, the Capitol wasn't innocent. But for people like us in a place like that, bad things were business as usual, and if not for me, nobody would care.

I never had to go back to the old business, or into the other one, and I even got around to paying back to some of the people I had ripped off. When my sixteenth birthday came around, men and boys of all ages were lining up at my door like it was payday, but I had had enough of Seven and especially the jacks for all time. I went to the Capitol with the new Tributes, and never really came back. We had double the collections, and lost both Tributes in the bloodbath.

I would like to say that Jan and Jen got married and lived happy ever after. The sad thing is, by Seven's standards, they had a happier ending than a lot of people. They did get married, and they had a little guy on the way right away. But Jan got to drinking a lot and Jen got to yelling a lot, and they both had to double up work just to support Row. They had two kids and a third on the way when Jan got run over by a payloader. Jen and the kids moved into the old house Row had managed to hold onto, until it got bombed flat during the insurrection. They all made it, though, and last I heard, Jen and the kids and a couple new ones were living with her new husband in 12.

Meanwhile, I learned to be happy enough with the Capitol life. I got to be a regular socialite, and yeah, there were plenty of men. After a while, I stopped having dreams where I saw Sky's angel outside the window of my high-rise Capitol apartment. Much. But I still have the other dream that stayed with me, of a sky so full of stars it was bright as day, and it's been years since I woke up thinking I could smell burning flesh.

Someone recorded the whole broadcast of the Games, start to finish. What I thought was funny was how, after everything the Gamemasters did to make us put on a show, their broadcasts always left something out. They must have had everything from a dozen angles, and they always left out some detail that would have shown the full depth of the brutality, the treachery and the insanity. Like, they showed Fiver come at me, but not how I stabbed him without even looking. They showed Napoleon shoot Niner and then fall into the jaws of the Mutt, but not the dart that had already killed him, or the rock slide that brought him down. My fight with Ion was cut out entirely, except one close-up of me getting bit in the ear. Nothing, ever, about Ion swinging the snake that killed her with the psychotic spite of the doomed. The one thing they left just about as it was Sky and me on the peak.

I was leaning against a tree, too sick to get up. I kept starting to slip away, and then snapping out of it, and once or twice a minute, my vision would go double. Still, I was trying to get myself together and do the deed. I thought I had my chance when he leaned over and looked right in mine. But I knew I couldn't, not while I had to look at him. But a throw while his back was turned, that I could manage, if I could see straight. Right when I was thinking this, he spoke. "Make little lights," he said in a tone I'd never heard from him before, like he thought it was urgent. "Little lights shining in Heaven."

He turned away and walked to the edge, and I got ready, but something made me wait. It wasn't that I couldn't do it. It was that, even after seeing what he was capable of, it felt a little too much like killing a child. That made me want to do something that was probably worse than killing him. "It isn't true," I said. "The lights in the sky are just balls of gas, billions and billions of miles away. They're there whether we see them or not."

He said, without even turning around, "I am not an idiot." He pointed up, and then to his temple. "Lights we see in the sky, to teach us about lights _up there_. Lights we see in our dreams." That was when I knew that he knew what I was planning, and he would let me do it. Then I realized something else, that, for the first time, I was going to have some real trouble about this- not doing it, but after. When I had to face Row at the train station, when I looked out my window at the woods, when I heard the birds singing and even when I saw the possum that raided my neighbor's bird feeder. When I stood before his angel under the starless sky of my dreams. Still, I knew I could do it. I just needed to get my reflexes together. Yeah, reflexes.

"Make little lights," he said. "You make little lights in the dark, every time you do good to me. Angel says tell you, you are the lights, not the darkness. Do not worry. We make lights for you, to shine in your dark." He stood there, looking up, and that was what people saw on the air: The young man standing on the edge, looking at the sky. Not the flash that filled the sky with a million lights. Not me drawing back my knife.

"I have an angel on my shoulder," he said, spreading out his arms. "Angel says... _It's time to fly_."

**An after note: I felt like wrapping this story up this week, so I decided to put this up today. I am planning on doing one more chapter, simply to post my character profile, and I will once again plug "300th Hunger Games SYOT" by CelestaIzFanLotz. I personally have found the first few chapters quite good, and am very happy to have contributed. I would also like to explain my take on Johanna's history, which is definitely against prevailing "fandom" interpretations: What I have offered here is nothing more or less than what struck me as the most natural interpretation of what is said in the books themselves, and I went with it before I was even particularly aware of other directions. I tweaked this chapter a little to acknowledge the "Capitol revenge" idea, while leaving things ambiguous (my favorite way to write!)**


	16. Appendix: Character Profile

**As a bonus, here's my original character profile for Schuyler Grey. I also plan to to some editing on the story.**

Name (1st and last): Schuyler Grey

Age (12-18): 17

Gender: Male

District (first 3 choices in order): 7 (alt 9 or 11)

Career or not: No

Personality: Schizophrenic disorder. Forgetful, disorganized and socially isolated. Talks constantly to angel he believes accompanies him. Acts according to angel's advise, in manner that appears random.

Appearance: Tall, skinny and disheveled.

Family: Mother and sister.

Friends: None.

History: Schuyler Grey likes spending time alone outdoors. He has an understanding of plants, animals and natural environment, but little formal education. He is an embarassment to his family and community, but is indifferent to and largely unaware of others' perceptions. He has a history of avoiding trouble and/ or coming into unexpected good fortune by following angel's instructions.

Preferred Weapon: Long knife of kukri type.

Skills (3 and maybe another small one max): Recognizes edible plants, and always avoids poisonous ones, keen hearing and good night vision, able to approach animals without scaring them off.

Weaknesses/fears (3 min): Sensitive to sunlight, minimal fighting skills, unwilling to kill female tributes.

Token: Ball of yarn, which he winds and unwinds when thinking.

Reaping Outfit: Appears in ragged patchwork clothes.

Reaped or Volunteered: Volunteered to replace sister's fiance.

Reaction: None. Has little or no concern for his own survival.

Chariot outfit ideas (I may change): Angel wings

Training strategy: Speaks to other tributes about his angel, convinces a few that he has special abilities.

Gamemaker Train test strategy and what you do: Takes no interest in training. Handles a dangerous animal in front of judges, and predicts the destruction of the Capitol.

A estimated Training Score (I may change it):5 for knowledge of outdoors

Interview Outfit (I may change): Forced to wear Capitol clothes

Interview Angle: "I have an angel on my shoulder."

Survive bloodbath or not: Yes

what got in bloodbath: Knife, bags of mango and beef, coat and rope.

did you fight in bloodbath: No

Arena strategy: Stays out of sight during daylight, avoids other tributes at all times. Leads anyone who approaches closely into a rope snare or natural obstacle (pit, mud, etc). Those he immobilizes are killed, left in trap, let go or offered an alliance, based on advise of the angel.

open to alliance: Yes.


End file.
